PROFESSOR SANTAYANA, publishing his first novel at seventy-two, has electrified the literary world. In feature reviews in the New York Times, Herald-Tribune, the New Yorker and Time, his book The Last Puritan, was fervently acclaimed as one of the greatest accomplishments of the contemporary era. For a fuller and more authoritative criticism than the Bookshelf can possibly provide the reader is referred to these reviews,--especially to Ellen Glasgow's-in the Herald-Tribune.

The Last Puritan is called a "memoir in the form of a novel." That is enough of a disclaimer to protect it from the accusation that it is not a novel at all but a profound and beautiful question-mark. It transcends, certainly, any pat classification into which you might try to slip it. The plot, except as a mere framework or skeleton on which the study of character hangs, is completely inconsequential. It could have developed a dozen different ways in a dozen different places without affecting the story's main interest, and this is its weakness as the plot of a novel. Incidents have been "dragged in by the ears"; incidents which do not develop logically out of each other. Such are the slaying of a College watchman by Oliver Alden's father when indulging in collegiate monkeyshines; (this one is the revival of an old Med Fac legend.) Mario van der Weyer's abrupt departure from Harvard when he is surprised with a woman in his room in Claverley, even Oliver's death after the Armistice in a motor accident when he is killed because somebody else was on the wrong side of the read.

But even where melodrama and co-incidence reach their height one's very solid feeling of satisfaction with the book is not diminished. Any plot, good or bad, would fade into nothing beside the consummate skill of Santayana's character-delineation and the grandeur of his expression.

Oliver Alden, who denied himself the easier road when he was yet a mere compilation of chromosomes--and chose to be a male, is the protagonist of Santayana's story. Born of Epicurean Dr. Peter Alden and hypocritical, timidly tyrannical Mrs. Alden of Great Falls, Conn., he denies himself the easier road all through his life. He is a real Puritan, as Santayana explains in his "Prologue." "He kept himself for what was best.... His puritanism had never been mere timidity or fanaticism or calculated hardness; it was a deep and speculative thing: hatred of all shams, scorn of all mummeries, a bitter merciless pleasure in the hard facts...."

Oliver lives simply--his money is a responsibility, not an instrument for pleasure. He bestows lavish gifts on his cousin Mario because Mario enjoys money more than he. Oliver goes to Williams because his uncle, Professor Bumstead, thinks the small and democratic college is better for him than Harvard. He plays football, sensationally, but only because it is his duty to play for his fellows. He accompanies his father on a cruise because he thinks he should and actually enjoys himself somewhat, but refuses to spend additional time with his father in the Mediterranean because it is his duty to return to America to college. But Oliver is no mere prig, no stuffed-shirt; it is his heart as well as his mind which calls him to duty, and it is by virtue of this extremely vivid impression of his character that Santayana shows his real insight. It would have been easy to draw a caricature of Oliver--not one novelist in a thousand could have resisted the temptation. But Santayana, despite his innate antipathy to the Puritan ideal, draws "The Last Puritan's" character fairly.

He gives himself more latitude with Mrs. Alden, and with old Nathaniel Alden, Oliver's millionaire uncle. They could have stepped out of Sinclair Lewis in their smugness, their fear and hate of the world, their lust for propriety. Two of a kind, again, though utterly different from the former, are Mario van der Weyer and Jim Darnley, the skipper of Peter Alden's yacht. Frankly sensual both, romantic and intelligent, the line between them is one solely of birth and breeding.

If splendid delineation of life and character is a purpose of novel-making (and the Editor of the Bookshelf is not going to say it is the purpose) Santayana's effort has succeeded completely. It is the greatest American book, in the reviewer's opinion, since The Education of Henry Adams, and perhaps the greatest American novel since Mark Twain and Henry James. A. C. B.